As Chakrabarty points out in his presentation "Between Globalization and Global Warming: The Long and the Short of Human History" [available in the University of Chicago International and Area Studies Multimedia Outreach Source archive], historians have only just begun to enter the climate change debate. This is my review of one of or perhaps even THE first full-length monograph, translated from the German, to address climate change from a historian's perspective. While I found the book original and interesting, I criticize it for a 'whiggish view of progress' in which challenge after challenge is overcome inevitably by the increasing power of human rationality. I find it ironic to argue that this dialectic will solve our climate change problems, when it seems to me to be more or less what got us into them.